USPS RFI – SMART STACK BUNDLE MAKING SYSTEM & SMART STACK LOADING AND UNLOADING SYSTEM via Federal Business Opportunities

The U. S. Postal Service (USPS) goal is to develop a fully automated, or ”hands free”, system for processing flats. The vast majority of flats arrive at USPS locations in bundles. Processing bundles is a labor intensive and costly operation. Unwrapping bundles is the major technical bottleneck for fully automating flats processing. The USPS is investigating a new method for bundling flats called “Smart Stack” that will produce bundles of flats for automatic processing without human intervention. The USPS is searching for a company that has expertise and experience in developing automated systems for loading and unloading material on pallets.1.1 Background
The mailing industry produces flats bundles and deliveries them to the USPS for processing. The USPS has several flats processing systems that use Automation Compatible Trays (ACT) to load mail automatically onto the feeder of a flats processing system. Currently, it is a manual operation to open a bundle of flat mail and load the mail into an ACT tray. The USPS Engineering group has developed a system for automatically loading a stream of flats on a conveyor into an ACT tray. However, the USPS is still missing a method/device to automatically unload bundles of flats from pallets, remove the straps and plastics wraps, and place the flats on the conveyor to load the ACTs. The USPS is seeking a solution to automate bundle processing based on the Smart Stack concept.

Currently, bundles of flats come bound in several different ways; plastic wrapped, plastic wrapped and strapped, and just strapped. The USPS is separately seeking a process to standardize the way flats bundles are created (See RFI #3A-14-A-0023 Smart Stack) to facilitate automated bundle processing

The USPS processes incoming pallets of bundled flat mail in several ways. In one scenario, when a pallet of flats bundles includes multiple zip codes, the bundles are first sorted on a bundle sorter. The sorted bundles are subject to being dropped several feet into a hamper. Then the hamper of bundles are dumped into the FSS SAMP or AFSM100 Ai system where they are manually unbound and placed in ACT trays.

1.2 Smart Stack Concept
The Smart Stack could provide the mailing industry with a potential solution to prepare flats bundles that are automation compatible for USPS handling. The Smart Stack is a bundle of flats held together with two straps (see Figure 1). Under the straps is a cardboard Smart Tag (see Figure 2) that provides information on the flats in the bundle. Through this RFI, the USPS is seeking information about an automated device that is capable of loading and unloading Smart Stacks from pallets for processing (see Figure 4). The Smart Stack unloading process includes automatically removing the bundle’s straps and the Smart Tag.

2 Purpose
The USPS goal is to have all flats bundles bound in a standardized way so that an automated system can handle bundles of flats. The USPS is looking for a supplier to provide an equipment solution that is capable of automatically loading and unloading Smart Stacks onto and off of pallets. The solution must pick up the Smart Stacks, load them onto pallets, unload Smart Stack from the pallets, remove the straps and Smart Tags and place them on a conveyor. Additionally, the USPS is interested in a supplier capable of providing a vision system that can locate each bundle and read the information/barcode on the Smart Tags.

The USPS wants to demonstrate to our customers (mailers) the practicality of using Smart Stacks. The USPS hopes to extract sufficient information from each respondent to determine the feasibility and possible production performance of the Smart Stack loading and unloading concept.

• Solicitation Number: 3A-14-A-0024 RFI – Smart Stack Loading & Unloading
• Solicitation Number: 3A-14-A-0023 – RFI – Smart Stack Bundle Making System.